Hastings Cent Rep. 2021 Nov;51(6):23-26. doi: 10.1002/hast.1292. Epub 2021 Sep 13.
Well before the Covid-19 pandemic, proponents of digital psychiatry were touting the promise of various digital tools and techniques to revolutionize mental health care. As social distancing and its knock-on effects have strained existing mental health infrastructures, calls have grown louder for implementing various digital mental health solutions at scale. Decisions made today will shape the future of mental health care for the foreseeable future. Here, in hopes of countering this hype, we examine four ethical and epistemic gaps surrounding the growth of digital mental health: the evidence gap, the inequality gap, the prediction-intervention gap, and the safety gap. We argue that these gaps ought to be considered by policy-makers before society commits to a digital psychiatric future.
早在新冠疫情之前，数字精神病学的支持者就一直在宣扬各种数字工具和技术的前景，认为它们将彻底改变精神卫生保健。随着社交距离措施及其连锁反应给现有的精神卫生基础设施带来压力，人们越来越呼吁大规模实施各种数字精神卫生解决方案。今天做出的决策将塑造可预见的未来精神卫生保健的未来。在这里，为了应对这种炒作，我们研究了数字精神卫生发展所围绕的四个伦理和认识论差距：证据差距、不平等差距、预测-干预差距和安全差距。我们认为，在社会迈向数字化精神病学未来之前，政策制定者应该考虑到这些差距。
